2006-01-26

Chapter 10 of Pacific Memories is up.

The men of the 136th Field Artillery Battalion have just finished pouring the concrete in the mess hall and installing field showers in their post at Viti Levu, Fiji: it must be time to ship out.

Our time was devoted more to lectures on the world situation and on maintenance of our equipment. Now we knew it was only a question of a few weeks, or even less than that, until our departure would be a reality. The great physical tension was about over. No more getting up before daylight, gulping breakfast down, and dashing off to a vacant field somewhere to hold simulated fire. There was the letdown from all that. But there arose a different tension, now, a tension resulting from uncertainty over the details of an event that was, in itself, an absolute certainty.

There is a wistful holiday season to the strains of "White Christmas", and 1943 rolls around. Our narrator looks forward to one last furlough ... and gets a belated and unwelcome April Fool's surprise.